ABINGDON -- Democrat Mark R. Warner opened his Senate campaign yesterday pledging not to forget Virginia's rural areas and taking his harshest shots yet at his potential Republican rival.

The first stop on a three-day, 12-city tour that kicks off his campaign in earnest was politically and sentimentally significant for Warner. Abingdon was the first event in his 2001 race for governor, a victory that broke a brief GOP stranglehold on political power in Virginia.

But it is also a region that Warner cultivated heavily when he was governor, pushing economic-development projects into the depressed region and highlighting its Appalachian culture.

"Southwestern Virginia is a part of Virginia that often doesn't get a fair shake from Richmond," Warner told about 240 people gathered in a middle school cafeteria for a Democratic barbecue yesterday afternoon. "I'll work with anyone to make sure everyone gets a fair shot," he said.

Another earmark of the rural strategy Warner used seven years ago to win over people who had usually favored Republicans in the 1990s were also there: a bluegrass band, Wires and Wood, played a toe-tapping ballad to Warner that became a campaign standard in 2001.

Warner also railed against partisan gridlock in Washington and promised to become a "radical centrist."

"Washington watched as jobs were shipped overseas," he said to an ovation from a crowd drawn from a region that watched coal-mining jobs dwindle in the 1980s and'90s.

He also took a pointed poke at his Republican predecessor as governor, Jim Gilmore, though he never said Gilmore's name. He criticized Gilmore for a revenue shortfall in the state budget that, by 2004, was estimated at $6 billion.

"Everyone was amazed that the budget shortfall that my predecessor left behind was four times greater than he said it would be," Warner said.

Gilmore has said Warner grossly exaggerated the shortfall the state incurred in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a deepening recession to set the stage for a $1.4 billion state tax increase a Republican General Assembly approved in 2004.

Gilmore is competing with Del. Robert G. Marshall of Prince William County, the legislature's foremost foe of abortion rights and same-sex marriage, for the Republican nomination, which will be decided at a convention on May 31.

Warner's tour is scheduled to continue through Wednesday. Today, he has a planned appearance at 3 p.m. at the Virginia BioTechnology Research Park in downtown Richmond.